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Norton Rose trainees offered £10k to defer

Norton Rose has offered its future trainees up to £10,000 to push back their start dates for up to 12 months.

Norton Rose has offered its future trainees up to £10,000 to push back their start dates for up to 12 months.

The firm has contacted around 100 of its prospective trainees due to start in either September 2009, January 2010, September 2010 and January 2011 via email asking if they would consider deferring for up to £10,000.

Head of HR for London Lak Purewal said: “We were reviewing our numbers for the next year to 18 months and decided that there would be too many trainees joining which would not be beneficial to either the business or for the individual.”

But the firm is not about to wave goodbye to its money easily – each trainee has to put forward a proposal as to why they should be eligible for the payment.

“We are not asking them simply to defer and go and do nothing – they have to come up with a proposal of how they are going to spend their time developing their skill set,” Purewal said.

And to make sure trainees still feel part of the firm while they are away, Norton Rose has said it will be offering short periods of work experience with its overseas offices as well as the opportunity to be involved with its many corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiatives.

The firm said there has been a good response from trainees. Graduate recruitment manager Karen Potts, who has been taking phone calls from the students, said the move would help make sure that all of its trainees were kept busy and got an equal chance of being able to qualify into their department of choice.

Potts said: “We want to make sure each trainee gets the best training experience they can from us and to do that we have to ask them to voluntarily defer so that we have a balanced intake.”

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Comments

There are 6 comments at the moment, we would love to hear your opinion too.

I wonder how they will ‘grade’ each Trainee’s essay on how best they will develop their skills.

Bettery yet, how about a Talent Contest? Bring all of the future Trainees into the head office, parade them around and vote them into categories. Worthy of working at the required times; worthy of a payment up to the £10K; and worthless.

Trainees are recruited two years ahead for a number of practical reasons. The biggest issue for most graduates is the payment of fees. If you left recruitment to the last minute or even looked for people a year ahead, candidates would be in a much less secure financial position.

What you seem to have overlooked is that it is not in any trainee’s best interest to go to a firm that cannot give it the best training experience.

I don’t work for NR, but it seems emminently sensible to defer people if there simply isn’t the work in the market.

Norton Rose, and indeed every other firm, should consider whether they should pay trainees’ LPC fees at all.

If trainees had to pay their own LPC fees it would make them consider much more seriously if law is the right career for them and if it is worth the financial commitment. It would also save the firm a vast amount of money, especially if they have a high trainee intake.

Paying a trainee’s fees shouldn’t be seen as a necessary incentive for any firm to offer, the training contract itself should be enough of an incentive.

Funding the LPC is a huge commitment but given that trainees outside the city generally pay their own fees and receive a considerably lower salary there’s no reason why their city counterparts shouldn’t do the same.

Sooo…after having successfully demonstrated that they were worthy enough to be chosen for a training contract, these prospective trainees (who I am guessing have signed a legally binding contract), are now expected to further demonstrate why they should receive the £10,000 for deferring their contract.

Hmmm…does this sound strange to anyone else? It seems a bit of a cheek to demand that they spend their time- when they are now going to be searching for a job to pay off their LPC fees/student loans if the firms didn’t pay for their LPC/other commitments- also proving that they will be spending the year improving themselves (any self-respecting prospective trainee would only use his/her time wisely in any event).

Not only that- they were of course expecting to be starting on a salary of £37,000 I imagine, possibly more. This seems a small sum in compensation for this.

Credit to the law firms for offering work experience but I think this whole scenario is absolutely ludicrous.

Perhaps these large law firms shouldn’t be paying their partners so much and free up the market to young talent- who at the moment, do not seem to be getting a fair look in at all in the legal profession. More than that, perhaps they should be paying more attention to clients- they should have seen this coming as soon as they started getting more debt recovery/ corporate insolvency work. They are after all always harping on about commercial awareness.

It is simply not true that firms outside London are unwilling to pay students LPC fees. A fair number of firms in Birmingham, Manchester and Liverpool all pay LPC fees. Look on ‘chambers & Partners’ and you’ll see that, to date, this even includes regional firms. Law students in the rest of Europe, generally, don’t do an LPC style course before they start practice which would explain why they are not paying for one. It’s unfair to suggest that law students embark on this career lightly. Securing a training contract is extremely difficult and, particularly for those struggling financially, it is only fair that the course is funded by their firm. Partners should take a pay-cut before the trainees and students are penalised further.